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I found this copy of what seems to be the source code: https://github.com/larsbrinkhoff/emacs-history/blob/sources/reid.org/%7Ebrian/misc/gosling-emacs-1999.tar

I found this copy of what seems to be the source code: https://github.com/larsbrinkhoff/emacs-history/blob/sources/reid.org/%7Ebrian/misc/gosling-emacs-1999.tar https://github.com/larsbrinkhoff/emacs-history/blob/sources/... It has copyright notices everywhere (not that this matters). And following notice in Installation: Please remember that Emacs is copyrighted. You are free to use Emacs internally, but you are not free to redistribute it. If someone is interested in obtaining a copy of Emacs, refer them to me: So you are not allowed to redistribute it without written permission from the author. I also think back then redistributing source code was the "portable" way if redistributing programs and redistributing binaries wasn't feasible.

kragen 7y ago
Yes, many proprietary Unix programs were distributed as source code so that you could compile them on your Unix system; this was especially important before shared libraries. It wouldn't be surprising if Gosling had at some point added copyright notices to the source code, and certainly the version Stallman was using had Gosling's copyright notices. There's a separate question of whether there was a version released without copyright notices.